


this one’s for Molly

by protectoroffaeries



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Critical Role Spoilers, Funerals, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Spoilers, Spoilers Through Episode 26
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 20:26:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15299379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protectoroffaeries/pseuds/protectoroffaeries
Summary: Molly’s dead. He’s been dead for a long fucking time.





	this one’s for Molly

**Author's Note:**

> @winking-owl over on tumblr recc'd me the song No Roses by The Builders and The Butchers, which is the song i listened to when writing this.

Molly spits blood.

As far as final acts go, it’s a pretty decent one. It’s defiant and messy, which is, coincidentally, exactly how he was trying to live his life. And this death’s not far from what he expected, either. Gored at the end of a blade. At least his past never really caught up to him.

He hears Lorenzo mutter, “Respect,” and then there’s the sickening  _ squelch _ and  _ crackle  _ of the glaive twisting inside of him. 

The pain comes on a delay, sharp and heavy, but quick. It fades to numbness almost instantly. Everything else starts to fade with it. He lets out half a breath. A new one doesn’t fill his lungs. The ground disappears. The heat. The treetops. He’s sure he doesn’t blink, but it’s all gone. Senseless.

Last thing he hears is the sound of Beau screaming. Can’t make out the words. Then it’s over. 

Then he’s empty again.

***

Until he isn’t. 

He woke up underground once before, and he  _ remembers  _ that experience, believe it or not, though he still can’t recall anything before the first time he woke in his grave. It’s more than a little weird that he’s waking up in a second time, but Molly learned a long time ago that his life is fucking strange, and he’s stopped questioning it. 

He tries to pry at the ground around him, but it seems different this time, somehow. His attempts to claw toward the surface are unsuccessful, his fingers glancing off the dirt. Debri doesn’t work its way down his throat or his eyes. Maybe the earth is packed tighter this time? 

He considers screaming. That’s how the carnival folk found him last time, but he nearly suffocated before they got him out. If Beau, Caleb, and Nott buried him on the side of the road where they fought the slavers (the road where he died), there’s no chance anyone’s going to hear him. 

Oh, hells. Why not try it once? What does he really have to lose? His life?

Molly opens his mouth and screams at the top of his lungs, fully prepared for the ground around him to rattle and for pebbles to sneak into his mouth. His throat itches just remembering the sensation of choking on earth, and he’s not eager to feel it again.

By some miracle, though, his scream doesn’t disturb much. Actually it’s probably more of a curse; if the earth is packed too tightly to budge at his scream, then there’s no way anyone heard him.

_ Fuck. _ He’s really going to suffocate down here, after all those attempts at heroics. That’s embarrassing. He comforts himself with the fact that no one will ever find out. 

Except he’s not feeling light-headed yet, which means there has to be oxygen coming from somewhere. He tries twisting his head - maybe there’s a hole by his horns - and then he hears it.

His saving grace. 

He hears the sound of a shovel pressing into the ground, and after a few minutes of the faint sound getting slowly louder and closer, he feels the vibrations in the earth as its being moved. 

The dirt above him  _ finally _ starts to dislodge, and Molly closes his eyes and mouth against the debri.  _ Someone’s _ getting him out of here. He hopes it’s not Lorenzo and his Iron Shepherds coming to piss on his corpse - that would be awkward. They wouldn’t go to the effort, though, on second thought. 

The shovel breaks the last barriers between him and the air, and Molly can see the sunlight through his eyelids, though he doesn’t open his eyes right away. He lets whoever’s found him finish digging first. 

When the dull  _ thuds _ and  _ clangs _ of metal against dirt stop, Molly opens his eyes. The sun is bright, and it blinds him for a moment, but after a few seconds, his vision focuses. He sees the outline of a person standing over him - and he realizes with a jolt of surprise that it’s Beau.

Maybe she’s not such an asshole after all. But then, Molly’s self-aware enough to admit that he was already starting to think that before he died. 

“Hey, unpleasant one,” Molly says as pleasantly as possible, grinning, though his voice comes out a bit hoarse.

He expects her to crack a smile, maybe call him a huge dick for dying. But Beau’s expression is determined and stoic, and it doesn’t change at all when he speaks to her.

Molly frowns. Maybe she didn’t hear him?

“Beau?”

No reaction. No response. 

Molly watches Beau toss her shovel aside and look up over her shoulder. “Yasha! I found him,” she calls, and the sunlight glints against something on her face. Tears. She’s crying. 

The light glints against something else, too; a patch of greying hair toward the base of Beau’s hairline. And then Molly notices there are lines on her face that weren’t there the last time he saw her, the most prominent ones under her eyes. She’s older. Visibly older. 

“Beau,” Molly says, and he sits up. “Beau, it’s alright. I’m fine. See?” 

Beau doesn’t respond. There’s a sinking feeling in Molly’s gut that maybe he’s not fine. 

Yasha appears at the edge of Molly’s grave, a hulking shadow against the harshness of the sunlight. From what Molly can tell, she’s in good health. The others must’ve managed to save her from the slavers, somehow. He hopes no one else went down in the process - and that they got Fjord and Jester back just as safely. Seeing Yasha safe curdles his growing panic.

“Oh,” says Yasha, looking over him,  _ "oh, Molly." _ The panic returns two-fold. What does she see that made her say his name like  _ that? _

Molly stands up and crawls out of his grave to sit beside Yasha’s feet, and neither woman acknowledges his movement. 

Molly looks back into his grave - and he sees what Yasha sees. What Beau saw that made her cry. It’s him. It’s his body. There’s a tiefling skull - it’s  _ his  _ skull - still adorned with all of his jewelry. He has the most ridiculous urge to berate Beau for not taking his jewelry and selling it. And then the rest of him is loosely wrapped in his Platinum Dragon tapestry. There are holes in the tapestry now, where insects has eaten through it, and he can see the white of his bones beneath it. 

Molly’s dead. He’s been dead for a long fucking time. 

Looking at the design of his grave from above, it would’ve been relatively easy for him to escape it safely if he were actually alive; they left room for him to wiggle, they left the tapestry for him to brace and cover himself with - they left him believing he would be back. 

“I guess someone moved the marker,” Beau says dully, and Molly’s attention returns to her and Yasha. He’s not upset that they left him, he understands how high the stakes were that night, but he  _ is  _ touched that they came back for him. 

“I thought…” Yasha trails off. 

“I know,” Beau says, “we all- we all hoped he’d-  _ fuck. _ ” She drags the back of her hand over her eyes and does a terrible job of wiping away her tears. “I’ll tell the others that he didn’t run off to play royalty in Issylra if you carry him.” 

Yasha nods.

Molly expects them to switch spots, for Yasha to jump into his grave and scoop him up, but despite Beau’s words,  _ she  _ picks him up. Gently. More gently than he thought she could do anything. 

Watching her pick him up feels like a memory that’s just beyond his reach, and he has an inkling that she held him like this the night he died. 

Beau lifts him toward Yasha with ease, and Yasha takes his corpse. Molly can’t help but laugh when they almost drop his head in the hand-off; it looks like the tapestry is keeping him together more than anything else, at this point. 

His laughter dies abruptly when he sees the tears on Yasha’s cheeks. She looks older, too, now that he takes a closer look at her, though it’s mostly in her eyes. He has to look away after a few seconds, an overwhelming sense of loss overtaking him for the first time in his memory. 

Beau climbs out of Molly’s grave and doesn’t bother to fill in the hole. Looking around, he can see that Beau and Yasha have dug up a bunch of other holes that they didn’t bother to fill in. Molly remembers Beau’s comment about the marker - his gravestone or grave-whatever - and wonders how long they’ve been searching.

Beau and Yasha take his corpse away from the holes, and Molly follows. They leave the clearing for a small patch of forest that they walk through in silence, and when the trees part again, maybe ten minutes later, Molly sees a wagon. And then he sees the rest of the Mighty Nein. 

Caleb and Nott are standing beside the wagon, passing her endless flask back and forth. They’ve both aged more visibly than Beau; Caleb’s lines border on wrinkles, and his hair’s thinning. He’s cleaner, though, and wearing better clothes, including a  coat in darker color than the brand-new one Molly last saw him in. Nott, while she hasn’t grown in height, has cut her hair and abandoned the dark trappings that kept her hidden when Molly knew her. She has a number of range weapons strapped to her, crossbows and guns and ones Molly doesn’t know the names of. She used to look like a waif with a secret. Not so much anymore. 

Fjord and Jester are a few feet away, standing in front of a reddish box on the ground. They, too, look older; Jester looks like she’s lost a bit of her bubbly energy, which makes Molly unspeakably sad. She’s thinner in the face, which makes her look exhausted, although she doesn’t seem to have lost any of the muscle in her arms and legs. Fjord’s salt-n-pepper hair has much more salt in it now, but he’s aged a little more gracefully than the others, and he’s clearly been working out. Molly’s eyes catch on a symbol branded into his armor; it looks like a holy symbol, but not one Molly recognizes. 

Jester is resting her head on Fjord’s arm, and neither of them are saying anything, but there’s a closeness between them Molly can’t mistake. There are tears on Jester’s face, and she’s gripping her Traveler symbol so tightly Molly thinks she might break it. 

As Molly gets closer, he realizes the reddish box they’re standing in front of is a coffin.  _ His _ coffin. And it’s not just red. It has multi-colored, thin-lined designs on it. Molly sees a little moon, and then a sun, and then he recognizes it. It looks like his coat. They got him a coffin that looks like  _ his fucking coat.  _

Molly loves it. 

Beau walks up to the group alone, and when Molly looks around to find Yasha, he sees her lurking in the trees.

Right. Beau has to break the news. Even though they already know the news. Caleb and Nott were  _ there. _

“He did not wake up again, did he,” Caleb says before Beau can say a word. His accent is thicker than Molly remembers. 

Beau shakes her head. 

Nott throws her head back and chugs from her flask for a solid twenty-five seconds. Jester lets out a little sob, and Fjord’s jaw tenses.

“Yasha’s got him,” Beau says, and she motions for Yasha to come over. Yasha steps out of the woods, and Molly hears at least three of them inhale at the sight of his body. Nott takes another long drink, and Caleb takes the flask from her as soon as she’s done. “We can take him home now.”

Yasha walks over, and Fjord and Jester lift the lid of the coffin. Yasha lays him inside, just as delicately as she carried him. Molly peers into his  coffin, which is decorated the same on the inside as it is on the outside. He has to look away after his gaze catches on his his own grinning skull. It’s too much, all of a sudden. It’s all too much.

Molly screams. None of them acknowledge him, of course. It’s soul-ripping. He wants to disappear. He wants to fade. He wants to be truly dead, not some shade cursed to watch his friends cry over his corpse. He screams for a long moment, drowning out whatever the rest of the Mighty Nein are discussing, and he falls to his knees. Even though he doesn’t have knees anymore, really. He doesn’t know how the fuck  _ that _ works. He doesn’t know how any of this shit happens. He doesn’t know what he  _ is _ . The screaming doesn’t stop. 

Molly keeps screaming until he hears Yasha say his name. For a fraction of a second, he thinks she can hear him, that she’s addressing him, but when he looks at her, he sees her gaze is directed to his corpse.

Yasha takes off her pack and pulls out a familiar book. The one where she keeps her flowers. His first gift to her.

“Molly,” she says again. “Mollymauk. I… I want you to have this.” She tucks the book under the edge of the tapestry. 

“Yasha,” he says, “you were my best friend, you know.”

Yasha doesn’t respond. Yasha didn’t always respond before, but back then Molly knew she was listening to everything. She always listened to him. And now she can’t. Never again.

“You should know,” she continues in that quiet, unwavering way of hers, “that I killed him. Lorenzo. I cut his head off.”

“It was pretty badass,” Beau adds, and Molly’s almost exasperated by how queer her awed tone is. He wonders if she’s had any success with Yasha since his death, and then the look Yasha gives Beau three seconds answers his question. They’re definitely fucking. Looks like feelings, too. 

Molly smiles despite himself. 

“Goodbye, Molly. We will never forget you,” Yasha finishes, and then she steps away from the coffin.

There’s a tense silence for a few seconds, as if the group is trying to decide who’s supposed to speak next without disturbing the air of the impromptu moment.

Then Nott steps up and flicks a gold coin at his body. It bounces off his cheek bone with a hollow  _ thump,  _ then falls into the coffin beside him. No explanation. There’s none needed, anyway. Molly wants to tell her to take it back, but there’s no point. 

Fjord comes up next, and he pulls a sword out of a sheath on his back. It’s one of Molly’s scimitars. Molly hopes he hasn’t been using it in combat, because that thing is a piece of shit. Fjord doesn’t say anything either, just sets the scimitar in Molly’s coffin. Molly spots his other scimitar on Fjord’s back as well, but Fjord makes no move to add the second one to the coffin. 

Caleb’s next, but he doesn’t put anything in the coffin. He kneels by it for a moment before whispering too low for the others to hear: “I will fix this, Mollymauk. I promise.” 

Jester’s after Caleb, and she drops an ornate symbol of the Moonweaver into the coffin. She doesn’t look at his corpse. She looks at the rest of the Mighty Nein. And then she says, “The Traveler can help me bring him back, I’m sure of it now.” 

Molly perks up, but the rest of the group seems to deflate. Why the hells wouldn’t they want Jester to use her Traveler powers on him?

“Jester,” Fjord says, voice soft, and that’s all it takes for Jester to burst into full, hysterical sobs.

“It’s not fair, Fjord! I can bring him back!” 

“It is not fair,” agrees Caleb. He doesn’t say anything else.

“Molly had a live fast, die young attitude,” Beau interjects, although she winces when her frankness causes Jester to cry harder. “He wouldn’t necessarily want to be brought back.”

“You don’t know what I want!” Molly shouts at Beau, childishly and fruitlessly. He wants to come back. He does. He can’t take this, watching them be sad over him even after years have passed. He can’t lurk for the rest of their lives, watching them struggle and being unable to do anything. He can’t. 

Jester looks like she’s about to argue, but Yasha speaks first. “We are not bringing him back. It has been so long. Molly is at rest. At peace. And it is not my place to say what he would or would not want, but,” she pauses, “all the same, I do not know that he would want you to stake your magic on his life, Jester.”

_ Stake her magic?  _ What in the hells has happened since he died?

“I would do it for him,” Jester sniffles, and Molly’s touched. 

“And then the two of you could sit around feeling guilty together the next time one of us goes down,” Nott mutters, sounding incredibly bitter.

Jester doesn’t have a retort for that. Molly supposes he doesn’t, either. Do they die often? Has Jester brought the rest of them back? He looks around at their faces, but for all his time being back from the dead, he doesn’t know what it looks like on other people.

A heavy, tense silence hangs around the group, one that stretches out the minutes so that they can all feel every passing second. Molly starts counting off the seconds halfway through it, and he gets to one hundred eighty before Beau cuts it off. 

“Let’s just take him home, alright?” she says in a gruff tone, one that Molly knows. It means  _ stick with the plan, asshole,  _ or at least, it used to. It doesn’t sound as harsh as it once did. 

The others nod in agreement, although Jester’s nod is grudging. Yasha is the first to move, and then they all begin packing their things onto the wagon in a somber silence that Molly doesn’t like. 

The only one who doesn’t move is Beau, who instead turns her attention back to Molly’s coffin. She tosses in something he can’t quite see, which is kind of annoying, given it’s  _ for  _ him. “Goodbye, you obnoxious motherfucker,” she whispers, but she chokes in the middle of  _ motherfucker _ . 

“You’re such a bitch,” Molly tells her, affectionate. “Don’t you know it’s disrespectful to speak to the dead like that?” 

She continues as if he hadn’t spoken, because she still can’t hear him. He’s starting to get used to it, which he absolutely hates. “Sorry we couldn’t do this sooner.” 

“It’s alright. I understand. I’ve been out the whole time, if it helps,” Molly says, knowing full well that it can’t help either of them feel any better. 

Beau doesn’t say anything else. She shuts his coffin and closes all of the latches, which are obnoxiously elaborate in their designs and their golden finishes. Molly peers at them, and he realizes with a heavy sort of delight that the latch designs aren’t from his coat like the rest of the coffin’s. They’re his tattoos. 

Beau closes the central latch last, the one shaped like the peacock feather that once adorned Molly’s neck and face. Molly puts a hand on the side of his face on reflex, except he doesn’t, really, because he no longer has a face. All that’s left of him is locked in that box now. Forever. 

Beau gets Yasha, Fjord, and Jester to help her load Molly’s coffin onto the wagon. They waste no time in leaving, and Molly goes with them, unseen and unheard, tethered to the Material Plane by something beyond his understanding.

***

The Mighty Nein travel for a week before they return home, wherever ‘home’ is for them. They didn’t have one when Molly died, and he doesn’t recognize the little town. It seems quaint, though. A nice place for adventurers to lie low after getting into mischief. And they have a house. With a garden. He almost wants to make fun of them for it. 

But Molly’s thoughts of teasing die when he sees the plot they have for him in the middle of the garden, among the flashiest and gaudiest flora he’s ever seen. There’s a dark stone with his name on it,  _ Mollymauk “Molly” Tealeaf,  _ and there are no dates. They could’ve put his death date on it. He appreciates that they didn’t. 

They all move his coffin this time, Caleb and Nott joining in to help lower it - to lower  _ him - _ into the ground. And then they go to work burying him. It’s quiet. Molly hates that none of them are talking. 

Eventually, there’s only one shovel-full of dirt left. It’d be poetic if it were in Beau’s shovel, since she dug him up and all, but it’s in Caleb’s. And he stops before he throws the last bit of dirt on the pile.

“Does anyone have anything left to say?” he asks. Molly wants them to say  _ yes,  _ and it’s selfish of him. But they all shake their heads, one-by-one, and he sees tears in all of their eyes now, even in the eyes of Nott and Fjord and Caleb where he hadn’t noticed them before. 

Caleb tosses the final shovel-full of dirt on top of Molly’s grave.

Molly starts to fade instantly, can feel his consciousness rapidly slipping out from under him, but it’s not painful. It’s not numb, either. It’s easy. It’s quick. It’s peaceful, even. Molly lets out a breath of relief with lungs he doesn’t have.

Last thing he sees is Nott pouring from her endless flask on top of his grave, and then he’s gone. 

He doesn’t come back.


End file.
